Hear Me Out: The Edit

from the fulfilled romantic

Okay, hear me out. Maybe love is real after all. Maybe romance is actually alive.

For a long time, I’ve found myself stuck in my own fantasy of love, and being stuck there created a very interesting problem.

I’m used to telling myself that I’ve only ever been truly in love with one person my whole life. But recently, I started to wonder: did I ever actually love him? Or did I just love the story I was creating—an ideal script of what I wanted, where he just happened to fit into the frame perfectly?

Being stuck in that fantasy, and the intense desire to make it real, was probably why it was so incredibly hard to let him go at the time. I hadn’t realised then that my mourning of the relationship was, more or less, me mourning the fact that the picture I had created in my head was just going to be that. A picture in my head.

But in all of this, I still had questions. Because as much as I feel like I’ve become a bit of a cynic over the years, I still feel like, you know…just in case this love thing ends up being for me, I kinda wanna get it right.

And then I realised… what’s cheaper than therapy? Speaking to someone who’s got it right.

I decided to re-educate myself through different perspectives, to see if my fantasy could be refined into something real. So, I sat down with my close friend, Oyinkan, who just recently got engaged – who I will be referring to as The Fulfilled Romantic.

Like most of us, The Fulfilled Romantic’s early blueprint of love was loud.

“Before I experienced love, I thought it would be butterflies, excitement, and an ‘I’ve found my Prince Charming’ kind of feeling,” she told me. “I expected love to be loud and impossible to miss, like a big bang of emotion that would instantly consume every part of my life.”

Taking in her thoughts had me like, Girl, damn. I can totally relate to this. I don’t know if it’s the Disney fairytales and Rom-Coms we grew up watching, or maybe it’s the heavy dose of Wattpad we had in our early teens, but I realised that in our minds, we equate love with intensity. So, of course, when I experienced my first intense relationship, my brain automatically started to believe that this was it, and I just needed to proceed with the fantasy.

In our defence (us real lovers (yes, I said it)), I think it’s such an unintentional and subconscious thing. We wait for the fireworks and the exciting moments to brag to our friends about. But when real love actually arrived for Oyinkan, it arrived quietly. Which is something we hardly picture when we’re daydreaming about our fairytale.

“Now that I’ve found it, I realize love feels very different,” she shared. “In many ways, love is surprisingly ordinary. It’s not a constant rush of emotion or endless butterflies. It’s the consistency of knowing someone will be there. It’s stability.”

That phrase—surprisingly ordinary—hit me like a frozen brick.

It forced me to look inward. I started to understand that my own concept of love was inherently a fantasy. Because how could I say I was supposedly in love with someone, while simultaneously wishing so much of his reality was different? I wished he were a corporate man. I wished he were a little more romantic. I wish he were closer to God. In my fantasy, he was himself… but optimised.

The Fulfilled Romantic perfectly diagnosed what I had been doing subconsciously:

“Sometimes we focus so much on a person’s strengths, potential, or who we hope they’ll become that we overlook who they are in the present. Without meaning to, we can create a version of them in our minds that doesn’t fully exist.”

And I did. Lol.

My fantasy didn’t necessarily blind me to his red flags. It just created a constant, frustrating mismatch: You don’t match the version of you in my head. I had spent so much time dwelling on “our future”—the great wedding, the cute babies, the millionaire jobs. It was easy to like him because he fit the aesthetic of my perfect dream. But while my fantasy was busy chasing a flawless script, Oyinkan’s reality was flourishing in the ordinary spaces I usually overlooked: morning texts, random calls, quiet presence, and shared prayers.

“The greatest surprise,” she reflected, “has been discovering that love doesn’t always feel like fireworks. Sometimes it feels like peace. Sometimes it feels like home.”

But where is the line? Is real love just about accepting someone completely and having zero expectations? Because I started to perceive it in a way parental way, almost, our parents love us, but it doesn’t mean they don’t want us to meet our peak potential. So, wanting him to be more – doesn’t that kind of mean the same thing?

I asked Oyinkan about how to balance loving someone as they are while still hoping for a future together, and she drew a brilliant line in the sand:

“Growth is important in any relationship, but loving someone and wanting them to become someone else are two different things.”

She brought up a question she once heard on a podcast that redefined her entire perspective: If the traits your partner has that frustrate you today became ten times worse, would you still choose them?

Of course, my answer was no.

That is the ultimate test of fantasy vs. reality. Loving an idea is easy because an idea never frustrates you, never has a nonchalant or lazy day. Loving a human being means making peace with their flaws and choosing them anyway.

“I don’t think that question is about settling or ignoring red flags,” she explained. “It’s about asking yourself whether your love is rooted in who this person truly is, or in who you’re hoping they’ll become. Because when you genuinely love someone, you’ve made peace with the fact that they are human. You see the whole picture, and you choose them anyway.”

When you genuinely love the person rather than the project, you don’t hold them hostage to a projection. When you truly love the person and not the picture, you make peace with their humanity. Their shortcomings. You see the whole picture – the strengths kind of draw you in and the flaws challenge you – and you continue to choose them.

Thinking about it this way, almost made me feel guilty in a way, because I was finally realising that I had wished and hoped he would love me for me, but here I was. Loving as a version of him that I was lowkey creating.

As she went further into my questions, I realised that shifting from fantasy to reality requires a total change in vocabulary. In our heads, love is a passive noun—something we “fall” into. In reality, it’s an active verb.

“What we have feels sacred,” Oyinkan told me. “It is selfless, sacrificial, honest, and intentional. Real love isn’t just something you feel; it’s something you practice. We have chosen each other, and we have chosen the work that comes with loving well. The work has paid off, it is paying off, and I believe it will continue to pay off forever.”

Hearing her say that made me look at her engagement differently. It wasn’t a stroke of magical luck. It was a continuous build. It was two people really seeing each other and deciding to choose each other through it all.

Perhaps the most grounding thing my friend shared was that a “happily ever after” isn’t a passive stroke of luck. In our fantasies, we simply “fall” into love and stay there effortlessly. In reality, it is a continuous act of construction.

Speaking to someone who “got it right” didn’t shatter my belief in romance; it actually grounded it. It showed me that the fantasy of love is an anxious thing. It thrives on uncertainty, emotional highs, and heavy projections.

Reality, on the other hand, is a safe space. It doesn’t ask you to alter someone’s style, career, or personality to fit a notebook sketch. It just asks two people to find a good partner, commit to becoming better versions of themselves, and do the work.

This brought me to the final puzzle piece. When I asked The Fulfilled Romantic if her relationship worked because she found the right person or because she became the right version of herself, her answer struck a perfect balance:

“I think it’s both. Finding the right person is important because no amount of self-work can make the wrong person right for you… At the same time, becoming the right version of yourself matters just as much. You can find a wonderful person and still struggle if you’re not willing to grow, communicate, heal, and love well. For me, love works at the intersection of those two things: finding a good person and being committed to becoming a better person.”

We tend to think of the “Fulfilled Romantic” as someone who found the fairy tale. But what my friend really found was something better: a safe, secure, and grounded reality. The idea of love is a beautiful spark, but the reality of love is a fundamental connection that you’re patient enough to nurture.

Maybe the real romance isn’t the story we write in our heads. Maybe the romance is having the courage to tear up the script and let reality surprise us.